Occupational therapist Jill Mays of Truro has been into growing food since the 1980s. Her garden has always been her escape, the place she goes to get away from the stresses of work.
She started volunteering at the Sustainable Cape Children’s Garden and was tasked with documenting everything being done in the garden by the kids.
“Of course I documented all of the activities,” Mays said. “But as an occupational therapist, in addition to writing down what the tasks were, I couldn't help myself. I had [look at the] benefits. When you're planting those seeds, you're using fine motor control, you're touching the dirt. That's a tactile activity.”
The kids were performing a long list of tasks in the garden that were similar to what Mays had them do in the clinic. She started thinking that maybe her hobby and her work were more connected than she’d realized. Then came compost delivery day.
“The sixth graders had to transport the compost that Bayberry had donated to the school and they had to take it from the pile over to the garden beds,” Mays said. “Needless to say, most people are like, ‘Ugh, that's a horrible job.’ [But the kids] were jumping up and down as though they were at a rock concert. And I’m like, wow, this is really interesting.”
Sixth graders, as we know, are in the midst of massive hormonal change. And Mays had seen in her work that this change tends to come with a lot of anxiety.
“Shoveling is heavy, heavy work,” Mays said. “And what that does is activates the joints and there's these nerves in the joints that go up to the brain and they activate what we call inhibitory neurons. Those neurons activate the filtering system in the brain, which really helps them calm down and feel better.”
Inhibitory neurons balance excitatory neurons in the brain’s network, and both do exactly what you’d guess from their name. The calming effect of activating inhibitory neurons by having kids move something heavy is something Mays has seen frequently in the clinic setting.
“This is the primary thing that I start with, with almost all the children I worked with,” Mays said. “The children with ADHD, attention deficit disorder, children on the spectrum, they all need to activate these filters because they tend to have hyper-anxiety, hypersensitivities. So again I was seeing the match between development and children and gardening.”
Mays started incorporating the garden into her work. One major challenge she saw a lot was kids struggling with sensitivities to touch.
“There are those kids that only want to wear sweats, or they only want leggings, or they don't like the way that their socks feel,” Mays said. “Needless to say, gardening looks incredibly threatening for those individuals because [they] don't want to touch the dirt.”
Mays would start the kids in the garden with one small task and say they could wash their hands right after. It was an introduction. But she found that for kids struggling with these issues, the garden setting helped them move past their discomfort faster than similar activities in the clinic.
“In the clinic, I did all kinds of things [with] rice boxes and shaving cream and all this stuff,” Mays said. “The thing in the garden is, there’s so much sensory stimuli bombarding you. You’ve got the vision, you’ve got the auditory, you’ve got the smell going on. There are so many things happening that those things help mitigate the discomfort of the touch.”
It was counterintuitive at first, but Mays saw this happen time and time again. The experiment became so successful that she decided to write a book about it. It’s called Nurturing Nature: Gardening for Special Needs. These days Mays is an advocate for the importance of everyone, of every age, getting outside and getting our hands in the dirt.
Elspeth Hay is the author of Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food.
